One Redditor revealed their college’s plans to install artificial intelligence (AI) cameras to catch people smoking, and fellow Redditors aren’t having it.
A Redditor with a very questionable username created a post on the r/privacy subreddit regarding their college’s plans to catch people smoking on campus.
While the user didn’t explicitly say which college was enforcing this technology, they provided hints indicating that the university may be the Maharashtra Institute of Technology.
The post reads, “This is the email we got from our college. I am not going to directly name it, but it is in India (same state as the city of Mumbai) and has the same initials as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
The email welcomes students back to campus and informs them that “AI-based face recognition cameras have been installed on campus and within a 200-meter radius outside the campus.”
The university employs AI technology to catch students smoking “on campus or near shops outside of campus.”
If anyone is caught smoking in these areas, they will be “suspended with immediate effect.”
“Furthermore, if any student is found in possession of or using e-cigarettes/vapes, he/she will be terminated from the University with immediate effect,” the email concluded.
The post received over 400 upvotes and more than 100 comments, some of which are quite ingenious.
Redditors didn’t hold back on solutions to this AI surveillance problem, and some of the suggestions are too good not to mention.
“Print 100s of face masks with the principal's face on them and hand them out to your fellow students,” one person said.
“Use AI to make an image of the principal smoking; have people walk around campus with a printout of the pic attached to their head,” another person suggested.
Another user suggested that students hold pencils like cigarettes while in the vicinity of the AI-enabled cameras to trick the AI systems into believing that they’re smoking.
“If a lot of people do this, the AI will give too many false positives.”
One person pointed out that AI will take information based on body posture, group clustering, arm positioning, time spent in specific locations, smoke, and other things like cigarettes.
This means that if a group of people pretend to smoke, the likelihood of students fooling the AI is high.
Users also proposed certain pieces of clothing that may throw off the AI’s pattern recognition.
The problem with AI-enabled cameras in public spaces
Understandably, many people are concerned about the use of AI-enabled cameras, specifically facial recognition cameras, in public spaces.
While they can be used for several good purposes, like catching child predators, there are many caveats when it comes to relying on AI technology to bring offenders to justice.
Facial recognition tools that use AI have been shown to be biased and could potentially lead to the arrest, or in this case, expulsion of innocent people.
The technology has already been shown multiple times to be unreliable for people of color, women, and older people.
This means that the technology is more likely to deem people of color, women, and other marginalized groups as offenders, given the lack of training data.
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